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| what is space-time? a whole new answer may be hidden in the black hole information paradox |
Can we solve the black hole information paradox? the answer may be yes. In the process, our understanding of black holes and nature will change substantially to a more microscopic level.
as one of the most special celestial bodies in the universe, black holes contain a paradox that physicists have yet to solve. at present, two mainstream physics theories, in explaining how black holes work, produce completely different and even contradictory results.
Many scientists, including me, have tried to reconcile these ideas, not only to improve their understanding of black holes, but also to answer more profound questions, such as "what is space-time".
Although we have achieved some results in the past time, the problem has not been solved. however, i have established a theoretical framework over the past few years that i believe will solve this problem well and allow us to understand the mysteries of space-time at the most basic level.
The problem we face is that, according to general relativity, the density of the body is too high, and under gravity matter collapses to the center, forming a black hole. when a black hole is created, no object, even light, can escape because of the gravitational pull in its region. theoretically, we can't observe the interior from outside a black hole, and the edge of a black hole called an "event horizon" is like a one-way film: matter cannot escape from the inside of a black hole, but it can easily enter its interior from the outside of a black hole.
But when we consider this question using quantum mechanics effects that explain the motion of elementary particles, we get different answers. In 1974, Stephen Hawking proposed the famous Hawking radiation. He found that if we consider the quantum mechanics effects of black holes, they actually release radiation very slowly. This leads to the black hole losing mass and eventually dying out. Today, this conclusion has been verified in a variety of ways, and its correctness is beyond doubt.
One strange thing, however, is that in hawking's calculations, the radiation released by a black hole has nothing to do with the way it was formed. this means that two black holes formed through different initial states eventually release radiation in the same way.
And that is undoubtedly a problem. Modern physics is based on the assumption that if we have a good understanding of a system, we can solve its equations of motion, thus predicting its future and inferring its past. Hawking's conclusion means that this basic principle is wrong. Many scientists believe the problem was solved in 1997, when Juan Maldacena proposed a new way to explain it, which seemed to prove that black holes did not lose information, but he did not really solve the problem.
In 2012, Ahmed Almheiri of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and colleagues in a high-impact paper provided a powerful argument that if a black hole did not lose information during Hawking's radiation, it would contradict the "smoothness" of event horizons. In their paper, they argue that things can pass through the event horizon without interference. When information loss is not taken into account, they think that the black hole's event horizon is not actually a one-way film, but rather something similar to some kind of solid wall, which they call a "wall of fire".
This has puzzled theoretical physicists, who, while reluctant to agree with the loss of information, are equally unable to accept the wall theory. for the time being, the wall of fire theory suggests that einstein's general theory of relativity is flawed, at least when it comes to interpreting the horizons of black hole events.
In fact, this theory is completely counterintuitive. for large mass black holes, the gravitational pull at the event horizon is indeed weak because it is too far from the center of the black hole where matter converges. thus, the area around the event horizon looks like a complete vacuum, but the wall of fire theory holds that space will suddenly "end" on the black hole's "event horizon".
The focus of my new work is that a black hole has multiple levels of description. the retention of black hole information and the smoothing of event horizons correspond to different levels of theory. at one level, we can describe a black hole from a distance: a black hole forms when matter collapses, eventually evaporating and dying, leaving a quantum of hawking radiation in space. from this point of view, madashina's point of view is quite appropriate, and in the process the black hole has not lost information. because in this scenario, something that falls into a black hole never enters the event horizon, not because of the wall of fire, but because there is a time lag between what falls into the black hole and the observer in the distance. things appear to be being inhaled "slowly" by the event horizon, and its information then returns to space through the subtle connections between particles in hawking's radiation.
On the other hand, if we look at the whole system from the perspective of a person who is falling into a black hole, we can see what is going on inside the black hole. but we must ignore some of the details of this observation system, for example, that the falling observer may fall into the singularity of the center of the black hole in a flash, too late to see anything. in theory, the information they can obtain in this process is extremely limited. thus, the world perceived by the falling observer is very "rough". in this case, there is no need to save the information, because we have already discarded some information in order to reach this perspective.
This is how space-time and information are preserved inside black holes: they describe the nature of black holes on different levels!
In order to better understand this concept, we can use such an analogy. imagine a tank full of water, a theory that describes the waves on its surface. at the most basic level, water is a collection of water molecules that move, vibrate, and collide with each other. with our full understanding of its characteristics, we can accurately describe it without losing any information. this description is complete and does not even require the introduction of the concept of waves. on the other hand, we can ignore this molecular perspective and focus our attention on water waves, describing water as a liquid. however, in this description, information about water at the atomic level is not included. for example, we can simply describe water waves as "disappearing", although the fact is that the continuous movement of the molecules that make up the waves is transformed into random movements of molecules, but no substance really disappears.
This theoretical framework tells us that the general relativity of space-time is not what we think it is, it is a basic description. at least its description of the interior of a black hole is at a relatively high level in terms of its multi-layered nature.
Scientists have discussed similar ideas in many forms, but this new theoretical framework allows us to clearly determine some relative microscopic degrees of freedom, or basic structural units of nature. it is involved in the formation of space-time and is likely to contain some theories that go far beyond our interests.
This new way of thinking about the black hole paradox could also be applied to recently by Geoff Pennington, Stephen J. H. Schenk (Stephen H. Shenker, Douglas Stanford and Yang Zhenbin. The project plans to apply the black hole scenario described by Maldasina to more rigorous but simplified systems. This will help us identify what characteristics a real black hole can or cannot be analyzed theoretically.
Since the days of descartes and galileo, the physics revolution has often been inextricably linked to a new understanding of the concept of space-time, and we seem to be on the way to such a change. i don't think it will be long before we can develop a new understanding of nature, which will not only change qualitatively, but also become more profound.
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